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The Web Stats Program Formerly Known As ‘Urchin’

Earlier this year, Google went ahead and purchased Urchin, a web site analysis service. A few days ago, they decided to roll out the service (now re-christened as ‘Google Analytics‘) for free. I’m sure glad I didn’t advise my employer to purchase the software a few months ago!

I had the pleasure of test-driving the package when it was still Urchin. It’s put together very well, and ties in to Adwords campaigns. When I saw that Google had released the service for free, I immediately signed on and created some tracking for a few web sites that I own. This was over 48 hours ago. It’s still not working! I wrote to Google asking for some help. This is what I got back:

From: "Analytics Support" <analytics-support@google.com>
To: ian@platinum.net
Subject: Re: [#38618476] Not tracking after 48 hours
Hello,
Thank you for your email.
We understand that you aren't seeing data in your reports,
even though you your tracking code has been set up for over
six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience. We have
collected your data since you installed the tracking code on
your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout
the day.
We are currently in the process of creating reports from
your data. You should be able to see your reports populated
with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is
associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics.
Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will
be at most six hours old.
For additional questions, please visit the Analytics Help
Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. If you're
unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please
feel free to reply to this email.
Sincerely,
Analytics Support

Well, it’s now ‘later today’ and it’s still not working. The reply I got from them sure felt like a canned answer. It lookslike I’m not the only one with a problem. I hope they get it fixed soon!